Sensing Developers’ Emotions: The Design of a Replicated Experiment Daniela Girardi, Filippo Lanubile, Nicole Novielli University of Bari Aldo Moro Italy {daniela.girardi, filippo.lanubile, nicole.novielli}@uniba.it Davide Fucci University of Hamburg Germany fucci@informatik.uni-hamburg.de ABSTRACT Software developers experience a wide variety of emotions during their work and research is now focusing on the role played by these emotions on software developers productivity as well as on their wellbeing. In this paper, we propose a replication of a study aimed investigating to what extent biometric sensors can be used to automatically detect developers’ emotions during programming tasks. The long-term goal of our research is to discover which emotions affect developers’ productivity and wellbeing during their work. Specifically, we aim at defining approaches for early detection of negative affective states that are known to impair mental wellbeing and productivity. 1 CCS CONCEPTS • Collaborative and social Computing → Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms; Computer supported cooperative work; • Software creation and management → Collaboration in software development; Programming teams KEYWORDS Emotion detection, biometric sensors, replicated experiment, empirical software engineering. ACM Reference format: D. Girardi, F. Lanubile, N. Novielli, D. Fucci. 2018. Sensing Developers’ Emotions: The Design of a Replicated Experiment. In Proceedings of 3rd International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering June 2, 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, 4 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3194932.3194940 1 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. SEmotion'18, June 2, 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5751-7/18/06…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3194932.3194940 1 INTRODUCTION Recent research has shown that developers experience and express a wide range of emotions during collaborative software development [3][16]. Emotions impact work performance when complex cognitive tasks, requiring creativity, are involved [1] such as in software development. Consequently, a research trend emerged to i) study the link between emotions and developers’ productivity and software quality [4][5][7][8][14][16][15][22], ii) understand the triggers for emotions at work [4][10], and iii) assess the impact of emotions on the developers’ wellbeing [9][13] . In this context, awareness of one’s own and others’ emotions is the first step towards developing emotional intelligence, the ability to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in the self and others [19]. In a software company, emotion awareness is beneficial for many stakeholders involved in the software development lifecycle. Increasing developers’ emotional awareness can be beneficial to improve productivity, resilience to failures and wellbeing. In such scenario, we envisage the development of systems able to detect developers’ negative emotions, such as stress or frustration. Our goal is to support them by suggesting corrective actions—e.g., take a break, do mental well-being, exercises using smartphone app like Rize 2 . Furthermore, the team manager or the Scrum master can benefit from the understanding of developers’ emotions. For example, they can identify and correct uneven task distribution, support a team member in solving a task, or simply listen to her problems and propose possible solutions. At the organizational level, information about developers’ emotional state can be used to evaluate a software development methodology. For a company that promotes and applies Agile development, detecting that most of developers are stressed and frustrated can sign that agile principles are not being applied correctly or that developers are not aligned with such principles, thus increasing the risk of developers’ burnout and high turnover. Among the information sources that can be exploited for emotion detection, emotion recognition from biometrics is a consolidated research field [6][11][12][17][20]. 2 http://rizenow.com